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Everything in Lucid
A bar, a dock that grows into a launcher, desktop widgets, a lock screen, and a settings app that runs the rest of the machine. Here is what each part does.
Six modules, each a pill that opens into a panel.
Settings → Bar lays the bar out as three lanes, left, middle and right: drag a module along one or into another, pick each module's look, or take it out of the bar. It comes in two shapes: island, floating rounded pills, or notch, flush to the screen edge with flares that blend into it.
- Workspaces. A dot for an empty workspace, a square for one in use and a new Material shape for the one you are on, with live window previews behind them. A scratchpad shows beside them only while it is open.
- Media. MPRIS controls, a seek bar, album art, and Shazam-style song identification through songrec.
- Tray. The system tray, with context menus that work.
- Clock. A five-page clock app: today with the weather, a month calendar with reminders, timers and a pomodoro, a stopwatch with laps, and world clocks. Whatever is counting shows on the pill.
- Notifications. Grouped by app, with inline reply for chat apps and progress bars for transfers. New ones stack under the bar, the newest growing out of the pill; do-not-disturb holds them back.
- System. Volume, brightness, battery and disks, full Wi-Fi and Bluetooth panels, a switcher for audio output and input, and two rows of tiles you arrange yourself, night light among them.
- Three more, off until you want them. Privacy, while something uses the microphone, the camera or the screen; Power, for the session; and Active window, for the window in focus.
- A bar on every display, if you want one, each showing that screen's own workspaces.
A dock that grows into the launcher.
A floating M3 toolbar with pinned apps, running-window indicators, drag to reorder, optional magnification and auto-hide. Open the launcher and the dock itself grows into it, instead of a second window appearing on top. One search field covers eight modes, each a pill, Ctrl and its number, Tab, or a prefix you type.
| Mode | Prefix | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Apps | — | Fuzzy search over your installed apps. Word starts and initials both hit, so vsc finds Visual Studio Code. |
| Commands | > | Shell commands and shell actions. |
| Emoji | : | The emoji picker's own list, searched by name and keyword. Return copies one. |
| Web | ? | Searches your engine of choice, or opens the address if what you typed is one. |
| Run | $ | Runs a command line, in the background or in a terminal that stays open. |
| Theme | >theme | Switch between the seven bundled palettes and any you have imported. |
| Wallpaper | >wallpaper | A carousel of your wallpaper folder. |
| Clipboard | >clip | What you copied earlier, images included. Pick one to put it back on the clipboard. |
Type a sum for a calculator: 2^3^2 is right-associative, as it should be, and the answer takes a card above the results. A typed search also finds open windows, apps' own actions like New Private Window, and lock, suspend, log out, restart and shut down. Hide any app with the eye on its row.
Eighteen kinds of card, sixty-one looks.
Right-click the desktop and pick Widget Panel: a sheet slides in with every widget drawn live. Drag one straight out to where it should sit, or click it into the first free spot. Pin it so it stops moving, and it comes back where you left it after a reboot.
- Snaps as you drag to the screen edges, the centre lines and the other widgets, with guides.
- Goes anywhere, including the strips the bar and dock reserve. A full-width visualiser tucked under the dock is the point.
- Sits below your windows by default and steps aside for fullscreen. Both are switches.
- Has its own sheet. Right-click, or use the gear on hover: every look as a live thumbnail, the card's colour, its size, and options like 12 or 24 hours and °C or °F.
| Widget | Looks |
|---|---|
| Clock | Digital, stacked, analog with a date window, the time inside an expressive shape, minimal (no card at all), or world clocks |
| Calendar | Full month, this week, today, or your next reminders |
| System | Rings, meters, a two-minute graph, quick-settings tiles, or network throughput, for CPU, memory, disk and temperature |
| Battery | Ring, cell, full detail, or every wireless device that reports a charge |
| Media | Artwork card, compact row, cover art with the controls over it, or a record that turns while it plays, in colours taken from the artwork |
| Visualiser | Bars, mirrored bands, or one filled wave, live off whatever is playing. Drag any edge to size it, right across the screen if you want |
| Weather | Now, a forecast, an icon and a number, or the next twelve hours as a curve |
| Notes | A sticky square, a ruled sheet that counts your words, or one line in display type |
| To-do | A checklist with real checkboxes, or just the next thing with Done and Later |
| Timer | A countdown with one-tap lengths, a pomodoro with a dot per round, or a stopwatch, the same timers the bar's clock keeps |
| At a Glance | The date and weather, and under them the one thing worth knowing now: a running timer, your next reminder, what is playing, a low battery, sunset, or rain |
| Photo | A frame that turns over your pictures on its own: filling the card, cut to a shape, or as a print with the date under it |
| Fetch | Your machine the way a fetch script prints it, as a card or as terminal output |
| Thermals | The graphics card in full with each fan and the power profile, arc gauges for heat and the fans, or two temperatures and a fan speed in a row |
| Network | A minute of download and upload as a graph, the connection in detail, or down and up as two numbers |
| Games | Your installed Steam games, one click from playing: covers on a shelf, the last one you played, or a list |
| Palette | The Material roles the shell is built from right now. Click one to copy the hex |
| Phone | Card, compact row, or a remote for your paired phone: battery, signal, ring, ping, send a file or the clipboard |
Scratchpads that slide over what you're doing.
A key starts its workspace's app if it isn't running, and pulls it back if you moved it somewhere else. Opened from the launcher or the dock, the app lands in its workspace too. The scratchpad key also puts away whichever workspace is up, so one key always returns you to what you were doing.
- Super+Alt+S stashes the focused window in the scratchpad. Pressed inside a special workspace, it sends the window back.
- Settings → Workspaces picks each one's apps, turns any of them off, and sets how far the screen behind dims, whether it blurs, and how much margin the windows keep. Add an app offers everything installed.
- Make your own. New workspace gives it a name, a mark for the bar, its apps and a key of its own.
- No Hyprland reload. The page writes
~/.config/hypr/lucid-specials.lua, which is read on every key press.
| Keys | Workspace | Opens |
|---|---|---|
| Super+Shift+S | Scratchpad | Nothing of its own. Somewhere to park windows |
| Super+Shift+M | Music | Spotify, Feishin, Supersonic, Cider, YouTube Music, TIDAL… |
| Super+Shift+D | Comms | Discord, Vesktop, Telegram, Signal, Element, Slack… |
| Super+Shift+R | To-do | Todoist, Planify, Errands, Endeavour, Obsidian… |
| Ctrl+Shift+Esc | System | btop in a terminal, Mission Center, Resources… |
A lock screen that asks PAM, not sudo.
A real session lock, laid out the way Material You lays out a lock screen: an oversized two-line clock in the wallpaper's own colour, the weather, battery, network and Bluetooth at a glance, what is playing, and your notifications.
- Grows out of your desktop. Locking starts from exactly what was on screen, which frosts and sinks away; unlocking runs it back onto your live windows.
- Two faces, one screen. Start typing and it focuses: the wallpaper blurs further and everything but the sign-in card steps back and stops taking clicks.
- Refusals that say something. “Incorrect password, 2 tries left” counts down against faillock's real limit, and a lockout shows how long is left.
- Small things that matter. A Caps Lock badge, the keyboard layout, a caret you can steer with the arrow keys, and power actions that ask before they log you out.
- Nothing reaches past it. Notifications on the lock can't launch anything or reply, and other screens show only the clock.
- A login screen to match. The lock ported to SDDM, painted from the running shell's colours, and every account keeps its own wallpaper and palette there. The installer copies it in but never switches to it. That choice stays yours.
PAM, like a display manager
It checks against /etc/pam.d/login, so any account can unlock and PAM's own words are what you read when something goes wrong.
Lucid is the polkit agent
Every administrator prompt on the machine comes up in the shell's own dialog. It names the action and shows whose password it wants.
Users and accounts
Names, account types, shells, passwords, pictures and groups for every account, all through AccountsService, so nothing runs as root.
Twenty-five pages, no config files.
A collapsible rail, grouped-list cards, an app bar that collapses as you scroll, and a reset arrow on anything you have moved off its default. The search field at the head of the rail finds any option by its name or what it does. Interface size scales the whole shell from 75 to 125 %, and Corner rounding sets how round it is. The Users and Accounts page opens from the card at the top of the rail.
| Group | Pages |
|---|---|
| Appearance | General, Glass, Theme, Colours, Palettes, Environment |
| Desktop | Bar, Dock, Launcher, Widgets, Windows, Workspaces, Keybinds |
| Devices | Input, Displays, Sound, Network, Bluetooth, Phone |
| System | Notifications, Idle, Date & Time, Storage, About |
The small things you reach for all day.
Screenshots
Region select, full screen, and screen recording with optional microphone and system audio. What you took floats in the corner as a card you can drag into any app.
Text copier
Drag a box over anything on screen and the words inside land on your clipboard. Emoji come across too, matched against your emoji fonts.
Colour picker
Click a pixel and get it as HEX, RGB or HSL, all valid CSS, with the colour itself shown in the toast.
Clipboard history
The launcher's Clipboard mode keeps what you copy, images included, for as long as the shell runs.
On-screen keyboard
Never takes the focus off what you're typing into. Modifiers latch on one press and lock on two.
Emoji picker
Emoji, kaomoji and GIFs from Giphy or Tenor, with recents, favourites and skin tones. Pastes into the focused window.
Toasts
A compact pill under the bar that any script can raise: qs ipc call -- toast show game "Game Mode On".
On-screen displays
Volume, brightness and microphone as a badge and a level. Caps Lock shows ABC against abc, not on and off.
Session screen
Super+Esc: lock, sleep, log out, restart and shut down, each on its own expressive shape. The three that cost you work ask twice.
Window switcher
Ctrl+Alt+Tab: every window on every workspace, newest first, with live previews. It stays up once you let go, as on Windows.
Workspace overview
Super+W or a three-finger swipe: every workspace with live previews, and windows you drag from one to another.
Timers
Countdowns, a pomodoro and a stopwatch, kept by the clock and shown on its pill, the Timer widget and the control centre alike.
Settings that run the rest of your computer.
Lucid's settings go past the shell. Each of these pages drives the real system service behind it, so it agrees with every other tool you use.
Network
Wi-Fi, wired, VPN and WireGuard, a hotspot, and an IP editor for DHCP or a hand-set address, all through NetworkManager.
Sound
Every output and input, each app's own volume and device, and playback that moves across when you switch outputs. Reads PipeWire directly, and plays Lucid's own system sounds, synthesised and levelled to one loudness.
Bluetooth
Pair, connect, rename, block and see battery, plus high-quality versus headset mode for headphones.
Phone
A real KDE Connect client: send files, read and answer notifications, a media remote, and a touchpad and keyboard for the phone.
Idle and sleep
Dim, lock, screen off and suspend as sliders. Lucid writes the hypridle config and restarts it for you.
Environment
Cursor, icons, GTK, Qt and fonts, written everywhere they need to go at once, down to a cursor without its shadow.
Displays
Resolution, refresh rate, scale and arrangement by dragging. The shell sits on whichever display you pick, and night light warms the screen by hand or from sunset to sunrise.
Windows
Gaps, borders, corners, shadows and the tiling layout, for Hyprland itself, live with a preview. Anything your own config sets still wins.
Input
Keyboard layouts and the key that switches them, key repeat, the mouse, the touchpad, and the swipe between workspaces.
Glass
One slider for how far the desktop shows through the shell, kitty and your app windows, with per-app frosting.
Notifications
Quiet hours, a rule for fullscreen windows, a sound, per-app muting, and how many popups stack at once.
Date and time
One forecast from Open-Meteo shared by the bar, the lock and the widget. The time zone is the machine's, set through a polkit prompt.
Updates
Once a day Lucid asks GitHub for the newest release and tells you once, in a notification. After an update, a What's new sheet shows what changed. Turn the check off in About.
Storage
What fills each drive, as a map you can zoom through, what could go with a confirm for each, and the drives' own health.
Account pictures
Old pictures stay on a shelf in the picker, newest first, so anything you have worn is a click away.
Keybinds
Every Hyprland shortcut in a list: change one, switch it off or add your own, and Super+/ shows them all.